The concept of open source has become a universally accepted development model since its beginnings over a quarter-century ago. That statement was never realized more than walking into the United Nations headquarters earlier this month to attend the second “OSPOs for Good” event. Open source had indeed arrived.
Policymaking and Strategy for Building Open Source Ecosystems
The week of July 8th saw Manhattan play host to a number of open source related events, starting with a “Day 0” event in Cooper Union on Monday, “Government Spotlight: Policymaking and Strategy for Building Open Source Ecosystems.”
This three-hour event, co-hosted by Digital Public Goods Alliance, Eclipse Foundation, and Open Forum Europe with support from the UN’s Office of ICT, provided “a space for mid-level to senior policymakers in governments, as well as those supporting government or working in relevant technical/digital policymaking functions, to learn more about current trends in open source policymaking and strategy for public administration.” I attended the event with ASF’s EVP Ruth Suehle and Board Director Sander Striker to represent the ASF and learn more about what governments are looking for when they say they want to use open source.
The predominant theme of this meeting was to level-set what delegates mean when they refer to digital public goods (DPGs), a concept developed by the UN to use open software, data, AI models, standards, and content to take on the challenges facing the world’s population. These challenges include the Sustainable Development Goals introduced by the UN Foundation in 2015, such as “No Poverty,” “Zero Hunger,” and “Gender Equality,” to name a few of the 17 items on that very important list.
Another concept brought to the fore in this Day 0 event was the challenges that face what is referred to as the “Global South,” a slightly controversial term that refers to economically disadvantaged nation-states. Basically, a post-Cold War alternative term to “Third World.” It also is used to refer to nations that have been adversely affected by capitalist practices, either in the past through colonization or in the present through globalization. At this event, and the two events afterwards, that week, there was a marked effort to use the term “Global Majority,” a collective term referring to “people who are racialized as Black, African, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the Global South and/or racialized as ‘ethnic minorities.’ These groups currently represent approximately 80% of the world’s population.”
Regardless of the term that will eventually be settled upon, the consistent message throughout the week was that the Global Majority faces enormous challenges to attain many of the advantages the rest of the world can take for granted. This being a government-focused event, the discussion centered around policies governments can take to support and uplift open source software developers and more efficiently integrate open source software into public good programs.
OSPOs for Good
This theme continued on Tuesday and Wednesday for the main “OSPOs for Good” event, where the Global Majority and DPGs took center stage in the many panel discussions held in the Economic and Social Council chamber over the course of the event. Attendees for the event were estimated to be around 250, with representatives from the ASF, Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation (LF), the Software Freedom Conservancy sitting alongside attendees from private corporations such as AWS, Capital One, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Salesforce, and SAS; and UN and government delegates, especially from Germany and Kenya, the nations which co-hosted the conference along with the UN.
ASF President David Nalley said: “I’m honored to have had the opportunity to speak at the “OSPOs for Good” event at UN Headquarters this week. It was a landmark gathering that brought together open source software leaders and policymakers from across the globe.“This event underscores the critical role of open source in addressing global challenges and shaping our digital future.”
Open Source at Work in the World
David represented the ASF on Day 2 of the event in the “Open Source at Work in the World” panel, moderated by Google’s Sophia Vargas (starting at 25:34). In that panel, participants outlined the clear success of open source in the technology sector today, but also pointed out the challenges that lie ahead. Governments have taken a keen interest in the development of open source software of late, most notably with the ratification of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a new law that has gotten the ASF’s and other foundations’ attention in a big way. The reason lawmakers the world over are focusing on open source software is because it has become so enormously popular and pervasive.
“Most of modern life has software involved at some level, and we know that open source components are a part of effectively all software now. So when we say everything depends on open source, quite nearly everything really does depend on open source,” Ruth Suehle said in a recent media interview. “That means it’s critical for those with the means to ensure its success absolutely must do so.”
Foundations, corporations, and governments–those with the means–will need to collaborate more than ever before to ensure open source software is safe and sustainable, the panel concluded.
The OSPOs for Good conference spent two days outlining the high-level policy aspects of government and open source software. On Thursday, 185 folks got together in the Microsoft office on Times Square to discuss how to make the conversation actionable.
What’s Next for Open Source?
The Day 3 event “What’s Next for Open Source?” was co-hosted by the ASF, LF, and OSPO++. Jacob Green from OSPO++ spearheaded the event, co-organized with Ruth and me from the ASF, and Nithya Ruff, Board Chair for the LF. While we all collaborated equally on the content for the event, it should be noted that the events team from the LF did their usual fantastic job pulling together a well-executed event.
As indicated, the focus of the Day 3 conference was more about how to get things done. Ruth was one of the keynote speakers at this event, outlining that ASF projects have already been involved in public goods projects, such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative and Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which provide open data to address critical science questions regarding the world’s oceans and biodiversity.
Another concept Ruth introduced in her keynote that we were excited to see adopted in other sessions throughout the day was one familiar to the ASF: the notion of “community over code.”
For those new to the term, “community over code” is the ASF’s way of saying we value a sustainable project’s community of contributors above the value of the code itself. This motto makes sense coming from the ASF, which strives to help communities of individuals work better together–the code is a secondary part of how the ASF works. Fixing broken code is much easier to do than repairing a broken community, so keeping a community engaged and thriving is a critical piece to how open source works.
This doesn’t mean code isn’t important, too, building something together is the focal point of the strongest communities. But while great code may become a tool that everyone uses, a great community around will create and maintain a project that has a far greater long-term impact.
The philosophy also emphasizes the importance of non-code contributions. Open source is more than just developers building software with code: it’s about writers creating documentation, organizers running events, artists building logos–all talented people from around the world building something that lasts longer than what they are building: a true community.
After introducing the term in her keynote, Ruth and I were pleased to elaborate on the term for conference attendees in other sessions and the hallway track. It was gratifying to see a venerable ASF philosophy get picked up by a new generation of open source enthusiasts.
How to Build OSPOs
I was honored to be asked to moderate two panels. The first was “How to Build OSPOs,” a speed-mentoring format that involved 11 one-minute lightning-talk presentations from fantastic speakers on aspects such as local engagement, academic participation, community sustainability, and OSPO business cases. After these lightning talks, the group broke up into eight circles where attendees could rotate every seven minutes to learn from our experts about public policy, OSPO communities and assets, non-government organizations, government, academia/research, culture and mentorship, metrics, and foundations. (I am reasonably sure my ability to watch a clock and being loud was a big plus for this one.)
Sitting in on the foundations circle with Chris Aniszczyk from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Hilary Carter from the LF, Ariel Jolo from the Open Source Initiative, and Enzo Ribagnac from the Eclipse Foundation, we explained to circle participants how the various foundations differ from each other, and what they offer for members. We had a lot of productive group and individual discussions throughout the course of this session, educating attendees on the benefits of software foundations.
Dialog on Impact: Global to Local
The second panel was more of a traditional format within the “Dialog on Impact: Global to Local” session towards the end of the day. The session itself focused on how global projects can be connected to local initiatives, and, conversely, how local projects can go back “up” to the regional and global levels via the ease of collaboration. The panel I moderated highlighted specific examples of how this works from luminaries Hilary Carter (LF); Jacob Green (OSPO++); Bastien Guerry and Alexander Smolianitski (French-German 100-day Challenge); Duane O’Brien (Capital One); and David Pérez-Suárez (University College London).
On behalf of the ASF, I would like to formally thank our co-hosts at the Linux Foundation and OSPO++ for their work on this Day 3 event, sponsors GitHub and Red Hat for handling the catering, and the venue hosts Microsoft and GitHub for providing the space to collaborate.
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